Aftermath
by auditoryeden
Summary: Eurus Holmes' talent for chaos and destruction has left marks on more than just the walls of 221 Baker Street. Or, Sherlock begins to fix the damage his sister caused, in him and Molly Hooper.


He doesn't go to her flat. He doesn't call her again, or text her. He leaves her alone for several days, and then he appears in the morgue, cautious and gentle, but all business; he's investigating the death of a twelve-year-old who was found with needle marks in her arms. Nothing's come up on the tox screen, but Molly's already finished cataloging the defensive wounds. The sight of the little girl on her slab, pale in death, with curly dark hair, has Molly feeling rather raw and unhappy already.

So naturally this is when Sherlock has to make his reentry into her life.

The last words he'd spoke to her had been those most secret and tender she'd ever heard in his voice. That might really be the worst part, actually. She'd told him to sound like he meant it, and he had. The second time, anyway, he really had, he'd sounded like a man realizing the words even as he said them.

It's just as well that she knows enough not to believe them.

He slides into the morgue, not entirely stealthy, just...awkward. Like he wants to be noticed and also doesn't, which is a feeling Molly can identify on sight since she spends so much of her life awash in it. The collar of his Belstaff is turned up, and he's ducking his chin like he might be able to hide behind it, worrying his irritatingly plush bottom lip, and not meeting her eyes.

"Hello, Sherlock," she makes herself say, and although she thought she couldn't possibly get through this encounter, inevitable as it is, without crying or screaming, she keeps it together, keeps calm. She doesn't manage to meet his eyes, but there's only so much she can handle at once.

"Molly," he says, and his voice strikes a blow at her. It's not reserved or cold or neutral; she's all too used to those. Instead it's that soft, almost breathy baritone he'd used on the phone, the second time he'd said the words. "I, uh...I need to see Lestrade's new body, if you, uh...would be so kind."

"The little girl?" Molly confirms, even as she's making her way over to the slab. She catches his eye for half a second and then holds it until he looks away. Her innards thrill with adrenaline even as she feels sick with embarrassment and grief. She wasn't the one to flinch this time. "Tragic, isn't it?"

He flinches. Molly frowns. "Sherlock?" she asks, her voice cautious but otherwise as normal as she can make it.

"Yes," he pronounces slowly, swallowing, his jaw tightening and releasing. "Very sad. May I see her?"

Molly makes an assenting noise, and pulls back the sheet, exposing the dead child. "Nothing in the tox screen," she reports, "No other injuries besides the bruising and the injection sites."

"So they killed her with...what, air?" Sherlock asks, very nearly in his own professional voice but, again, too soft. Too kind.

"I'd assume so," she says. "Cause of death seems to be heart failure. Since there's nothing chemical to explain it, I'd have to say it's an embolism. Injection sites and bruise patterns say foul play. Now it's your turn, tell me about her."

"Dead mother, working father, no siblings," Sherlock rattles off, circling the dead girl. "She likes science and painting. Lives on an estate."

Molly nods as he goes on, and finally he comes to a halt by the child's dark, curly head. Molly watches by her feet as Sherlock stretches out a hand and cards through the hair, still clean and relatively untangled, just once. His face is a picture of conflict and distress, more feeling than she's used to seeing on it.

"She reminds you of someone," Molly guesses, and his sharp glance up at her tells her she's right.

"My sister," he admits, after a moment, and then, "Thank you, Molly."

His gloved fingers touch her elbow lightly as he leaves, apparently with whatever information it was he'd been seeking.

He has a sister.

She never, ever would have guessed it, from the way he behaves. Men with sisters generally have a better idea of what is and is not okay to say to a woman friend than those without. Mycroft and Sherlock both seem to lack that more innate understanding, although she supposes that could just be the way they are. Perhaps, if they hadn't had a sister, they'd be worse yet. That's a horrifying thought.

It is odd that they've never mentioned her once. She's known Sherlock for nearly a decade and while she'd had an inkling of Mycroft's existence almost all of that time, she'd never once heard even the slightest mention of a third Holmes child. Nor has Mycroft, in the time since Molly became acquainted with him, made the smallest passing reference to another little sibling. Despite their evident dislike for one another, Sherlock and his brother had always seemed very close, and it's odd that they have another sibling, one who's apparently barely in their lives.

Unless, Molly realizes, she'd died when they were young. This girl is, after all, only twelve. It can be difficult to talk about the people you lose when you're young, before you're really old enough to understand how mourning works, and memory, after all, can be a tricky thing.

She gives the little corpse a sad smile, and drags the sheet over it again.

The next time she sees Sherlock, he's in her flat, uninvited, and Molly is home early from work.

Her plans for the evening had included a lovely baked salmon and some nice green beans, accompanied by a glass of white wine and then, possibly, a good cry while she watched Doctor Who reruns.

They had not included unlocking her door, only to discover a consulting detective kneeling on her kitchen counters, fiddling with-

"Is that a bloody camera?" she demands, too busy being shocked and incredulous to indulge her hurting heart.

"Shit," Sherlock says, "this isn't what it looks like."

"I hope not," Molly says, flatly. She sets her shopping down and peers up at him. "What is it, then."

"It's a camera," he admits, twisting something too small for her to see, and then it drops into his hand. "Here."

What it is is the smallest camera Molly's ever seen, with a little blinking red light on the side. Sherlock slides off her counter and moves to peer at the corner over the door. There's another very small camera there, too, Molly realizes with a start, a little white plastic one that blends in with the ceiling. "Whose are these, Sherlock?" she asks him, peering from the tiny lens in her hand to the tiny lens on her ceiling. He frowns at it, before pulling one of her kitchen chairs over and standing on it.

"My sister's," he says, distantly. "I think. This is the third one. I think that's all, but we should check the other rooms as well."

"I thought…why is your sister watching me?"

He glances down at her inscrutably. "Because she's psychotic," he answers, and the third little camera drops into his hand. "It's a very long story, and not one I think you'd enjoy. You are, however, safe now."

"Now," Molly echoes. "I wasn't before, then."

"No," he admits. "None of us were. She, erm. She conspired with Moriarty, actually."

"Oh."

Well, if that doesn't just about put the cherry on this dreadful week, she doesn't know what will. Sherlock is back to not looking her in the eye, fiddling instead with the camera in his hands til the light shuts itself off.

"Tell me about her," Molly says, not entirely sure why she's doing it. She wants him away from her, out of sight and mind, but she's also sort of reveling in how she's holding it together and acting normal—and he isn't.

Sherlock swallows as Molly begins to unpack her dinner groceries, and settles himself awkwardly at her kitchen table. "I hardly remember her, really," he tells her, low and gravelly. "Even now. She was...odd. I know you...I know people think I'm weird, a freak even. Mycroft is worse than me, and she...she is so far from us that she may as well exist on another planet. I was—I am, rather, a year older than her. When we were small, I never wanted to play with her. She was a girl, and she didn't understand our games, mine and..." His eyes flicker up to her face, and he watches her for a while, silent. "She murdered my best friend," he says finally, and Molly stares at him, frozen. "I was...I don't even know. Maybe seven years old. She put him in a well, and never told a living soul where he was. His name was Victor.

"And then she set fire to our family home," he went on, looking a little glazed. "Or so I'm told. I don't remember much of it. After that, they took her away, put her in a secure home. She's been locked up ever since, more or less."

"More or less?" Molly echoes, reaching for an onion and a knife, something to do to keep her hands busy.

"She had, in fact, been escaping the secure facility in which she was held pretty regularly, for a while there," he tells her, as though it's nothing. "That's been remedied, though."

"Remedied," Molly repeats. The rhythmic thunk of the knife on the cutting board is comforting, and the burn of the onions in her eyes gives her an excuse to release some of her composure. "Did she have anything to do with your flat blowing up?"

"Quite," Sherlock confirms, dryly. "It seems all the Holmes children have a bit of an unhealthy relationship with explosives."

"Hmm."

Sherlock sighs, quietly. Molly glances up at him for half a second, and her stomach cramps, because he's looking sad again, more even than he used to. His shoulders are tense, and his eyes too, and he seems utterly exhausted, like he's only barely managing to keep existing.

She decides to let him be, for the moment, and gets on with preparing her dinner.

"I wasn't going to tell you," Sherlock says, eventually, in that too-soft voice. It's not the same one he uses to flirt with her, though it's close, something of the same overtones, but the subtext of it is totally different. Sincere, somehow. It's similar, too, to his not-being-a-total-bastard voice, the one she's really only become familiar with in the aftermath of Moriarty. Part of Molly wishes he'd stop becoming a better person; it makes it harder and harder to try and not be in love with him.

"Tell me what?" she asks, matching his volume. "About your sister?"

"Sort of," he answers, obscurely. "She doesn't understand emotion, you see, and of the three of us I am by far the most emotional. The most sentimental. She decided to test me, observe my reactions to a number of...experiments. One of them was you."

Molly can't quite manage to hold on to her tears, hearing that. He looks just as torn as she feels, though, so she holds her peace, swiping at her cheeks with her jumper sleeves.

"She put us in a room with a coffin," he tells her, blank-eyed as he once had been for hours, after his own death. "Not a particularly nice one, the sort of coffin a woman with no close family might end up with. The right height for someone small, only five feet four inches. Five foot, four inches, a woman whose death would...provoke feelings in me.

"You," he summarizes, looking up at her. "She informed me that this flat was rigged with bombs, which she would detonate unless I could make you admit that..." A shaking breath. Molly takes one just after him, realizing as she does that she'd been holding it. "If it took more than three minutes, she would detonate the bombs," he says, softly. "If I let on in any way that something was wrong, that I was in danger, or you were, she would detonate the bombs."

"Sherlock," Molly breathes, "Please do not tell me that there are bombs in my flat right now."

"No," he shakes his head, and she exhales tremulously. "There never were bombs in your flat. But I...that coffin, Molly. The moment I realized who it was meant for, my higher reasoning utterly failed me. I should have realized that it wouldn't have been logical for Eu...for my sister to have planted explosives here. She didn't know, after all, that...that..." His eyes close and he blows out a breath.

"I wasn't making fun of you," he declares. "I wasn't trying to hurt you, and I'm sorry that I did. But, Molly, I didn't lie to you."

She doesn't let herself breath, doesn't let herself react. She knows he's waiting for some kind of signal, but she's done with making things easy for Sherlock Holmes. Whatever it is he's trying to say, he's going to have to say it on his own.

"I can't seem to stop seeing that damned coffin," he confesses, opening his eyes and looking straight at her. "I tore it to pieces with my bare hands; John thought I'd gone utterly mad. I destroyed it, but it's still there, in my head, and I keep seeing you in it. It's driving me insane, Molly.

"I promised John I'd leave you alone. But I can't. I have to be near you. I have to...convince myself you're still alive." His mouth is pursed with feeling, an emotion she can't quite identify. "I can't bear the thought of a world without you in it, Molly," he admits, and hell, his voice is ashen soft again, with that revelatory note that made him sound so very sincere on the phone.

"I'm not dead," she assures him, lamely. "Look at me."

"I see you," he smiles, just a little. "You're a sight for sore eyes."

There's not much she can say to that, so she smiles back, and goes to put the fish in the oven.

She's just set the timer and turned back to the green beans, when something occurs to her. "You weren't lying?" she repeats, frowning. "About what?"

"I...about..." Sherlock looks positively constipated. "When I said that I loved you. I wasn't lying. It was the truth."

Her chest fills up with sensation; joy, and regret, and disappointment. "You don't have to try and make me feel better," she says. "I know you don't mean it the way I did. The way I do."

"You know no such thing, Molly," he corrects her, gently, and he stands from her table. "I admit I'm not...totally conversant in emotions. I've spent the better part of my life attempting to deny that they ever afflict me, and it's only recently that I've managed to accept that they aren't an unforgivable failure of my operating system, but I know what the...symptoms of romantic love are. I've observed them in enough people to recognize them on sight. Not, however, in myself. That took a bit longer."

"Oh my god," Molly mutters to herself, as he comes around the island. She draws back half a step, watching him, his oddly clear eyes and open expression. "So help me, Sherlock if this is some sort of game, I will gut you." She brandishes her extremely sharp and well-honed, carbon steel chef's knife to underline her point.

"I admire your propensity for and skill with knives," he tells her, very straight-forwardly, "But it would be nice if you'd put that one down. I swear to you, I'm not lying, I'm not playing, and I'm not manipulating you."

"You are a complete bastard," she tells him, but she's breathless enough that the words don't have quite the heft she'd intended. Exhilaration and heady surprise are drowning out every other feeling, the humiliation and pain and frustration.

"Yes," he agrees, and then he takes the knife from her hand, lays it on the cutting board, and, very slowly, draws her into a kiss.

It's a good kiss, warm and soft, and full of relief and comfort, and despite all that rather unsensual. It settles her stomach and makes her chest feel warm, but elicits no troubling stirrings in her belly.

Then Sherlock pulls her close, lifts her to sit on the counter, and presses his ear against her collarbone, listening. Her head is at just the right height for her to bury her nose in his hair, take in the smell of him. She knows it well already, has for years, and it's that smell that makes her heart beat more heavily. "You're in love with me," Molly realizes. "You actually are."

"I am, after all, just a man," he murmurs, a low rumble against her sternum. "No matter what I had taught myself to believe."

"That's alright," she tells him. "I don't need you to be anything else."

She can feel him smiling. "Then you are very nearly totally unique."

"John?" she guesses.

"And my parents, yes." The tension is seeping out of his shoulders as he listens to her heart, and she lets herself stroke his dark curls. "God, Molly. You're not allowed to die on me."

"I'll do my best," she promises. "If you'll do the same."

"I shall endeavor not to place myself in an undue amount of danger," he says. "I shall also advise you to change your locks. I suspect that the cameras have been here since Moriarty, but it can't hurt to be safe."

"No," Molly agrees, feeling slightly ill again. Then, "You need to let me up; the fish is almost done and I haven't started the beans. Will you stay for dinner?"

Sherlock straightens himself, so their faces are nearly level, and peers at her. "If you want me to," he offers, and Molly has to smile to herself; it's clear that John's delivered a blistering lecture on boundaries at some point in the last few day, probably in the same conversation that led Sherlock to promise to leave her alone.

"I do," she says. "I want you to stay. Now budge up, or we'll be eating takeaway."

"Your cooking is vastly superior to takeaway," he comments, backing away and leaning against the small, useless spit of counter top between her fridge and the sink, neatly out of the way. "I have always said so."

"You've never said so," she corrects, gamely, fetching the oven mitts. "If you want to make yourself useful, chop that garlic."

"I've thought it several times," he mutters, as though thought is the same as speech, and takes over the cutting board with economical skill. A cloud of rosemary steam wafts out of the oven as Molly opens it, and she hears Sherlock's stomach gurgle all the way across the kitchen.

"I've never understood why you eat so poorly," Molly says, almost to herself. "You do like good food, and you can cook well enough, but you subsist on biscuits and sandwiches."

"The body is transport," he responds, scraping the chopped garlic into the saute pan she'd liberated from its hook. "If good food is convenient then it's logical to enjoy it. If not, you eat what's close at hand."

"Which, if John didn't have anything to say about it, would probably include the thumbs I gave you two weeks ago," Molly predicts, severely. She can't quite keep the little smile off her face, though, and when Sherlock looks sharply up at her, alarmed, he softens.

"I don't eat my experiments. Lose too much data that way."

"Or you'd gather a lot of data. Hypothesis, consumption of two-week-old thumbs with gangrene by an adult male results in violent illness." Molly elbows him neatly out of the way to pout the beans into the pan and begin stirring. "Go set the table."

"Oddly, I find myself uninterested in the kind of data that comes from human experimentation," Sherlock says. He doesn't even sound particularly ironic, merely tired. "I've had enough of being a lab rat to do me for the rest of my life."

"Good," Molly tells him, decisive.

Their dinner is quiet, mostly filled with the sounds of eating and drinking. Sherlock puts away food as though he hasn't eaten in a week, which, Molly knows, is entirely possible. He looks terribly haggard, possibly from a combination of lack of food and sleep. It would explain why his bones look even sharper than usual in his face, why his eyes are so very darkly circled.

"You haven't really slept since she blew up your flat," Molly guesses, dispassionately. "It's been nearly five days, Sherlock."

"I've been a bit busy," he huffs. "What with thwarting a psychopath and everything."

"And have you begun hallucinating yet?" she asks. He merely frowns at her. "You need to get some rest."

"I will," he says. "I'll try."

"Shouldn't take much trying if you've been awake for a week."

"Awake, on and off," Sherlock corrects. "Mostly awake."

"Uh huh. Have you really not had the time?"

He takes a bite of salmon to dodge this question, then spends a truly inordinate amount of time chewing, buying time. Molly watches him patiently and sips from her wine glass, savoring the expression on Sherlock's face—the face of the man who's just told her he loves her, after all—and the crisp tang of the wine in equal measure. Eventually, he swallows what must be the most thoroughly masticated mouthful of fish the world has ever known.

"I told you earlier that I keep seeing the coffin my sister chose for you. It's been...unsettling."

"Which is why you were listening to my heart," Molly realizes. "You can stay here, if you need to. Not-" she blushes, "-Not for...but, if it'll help, you can sleep with...next to me."

His expression is both amused and nakedly grateful. "I assure you, Molly, I am much too tired to harass you with carnal advances. Tonight, anyway. Thank you."

"Tonight," Molly repeats, and she flushes a little, feels her heart pick up. Maybe this is preposterous, flying straight from devastated awkwardness to love and comfort and, strangest of all, domesticity, but none of it feels wrong. This is just Sherlock, granted more communicative than she's ever known him to be, but she's quite sure once he's finally slept and regained his footing he'll be back to normal, although possibly with more kissing and an option on future sex. She knows Sherlock, has for so long that even when she's stammering and drowning in her own inconvenient anxiety, she almost always feels comfortable around him.

Watching him wash dishes in her kitchen is a little odd, but it's the kind of odd she can get used to. He starts a little when she rests her forehead in the center of his back, but he sighs straight after, and relaxes against her.

In bed, when the kitchen is cleaned and John has been notified that Sherlock isn't coming back to his flat overnight, Molly strips off her bulky flannel shirt and lets Sherlock rest his cheek on her chest, his ear separated from her skin by only a thin camisole. His hand sweeps softly over her belly as he listens, and slowly, comfortably, for the first of many times, they drift off to sleep together.

That night, nobody has nightmares.


End file.
